Onfido Raises 30 Million USD in Funding

With time, the nature of crimes being committed all over the world too are changing. The world over people are moving away from the analog (human) based systems to digital platforms that make processes easier to handle and monitor.

But they say they have two sides to every coin. So, while going digital has made our leaves easier, it has also given rise to a new set of criminals known as cyber criminals . These cyber criminals are the reason we have been hearing about many a case of data breaches all over the world, the latest being Equifax.

Data breaches such as Equifax have pushed the notion of cyber security, a relatively unheard term until a few years back, into prime spotlight. Keeping in line with this demand all over the world, many businesses are competing to showcase their solution as the one stop shop for all of one's cybersecurity needs.

Onfido, a cybersecurity startup in this space based out of London, has caught the market's eye with their AI (artificial intelligence) based facial identification platform.

Onfido recently raised a total of thirty million USD in its latest round of funding, taking up its total funding to sixty million USD since the date of inception. This latest round was led by Crane Venture Partners. The round also saw participation from Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and a long list of other existing investors that choose not to be named.

Husayn Kassai, Co-founder and CEO Onfido along with Eamon Jubbawy, Co-founder and COO as well as Rahul Amin, Chief Architect have stated that Onfido would not release its private valuation post the latest round.

How it all began

Onfido was started in 2012 by Kassai and Jubbawy with a focus on background checks, thereby positioning itself as a pivotal solutions provider in the sudden surge of the on demand businesses that have been scaling up their staff both permanent as well as temporary.

Uber was a marquee customer that used to use Onfido’s platform for the criminal background checks of its drivers.

The road ahead

Over the last year, Onfido has been targeting the financial services industry and e-commerce industry. It performs background identity checks for the staff and its end users. At the moment, Onfido has about fifteen hundred active customers which includes the likes of Zipcar, Revoult and Square.

The “Know your Customer” part of the banking process that requires the banks customers to visit the bank and for their long and onerous checks such coming to the bank to prove their own identity or even lengthy online checks is now a thing of the past.

The general drop off rate due to irregularities discovered in background checks is around forty percent. This forty percent is what Onfido is targeting to reduce. Onfido does this with an interesting solution that is based on standard identity documents — it recognises some 600 formats right now, from drivers’ licenses from dozens of countries, to passports, identity cards and so on — and a “selfie” on your phone.

Onfido currently operates an extremely sound team of AI engineers, machine learning specialists as well as computer vision specialists. Crane Venture Partners substantiates it's investment in Onfido growth prospects that Onfido's current research and development pipeline holds and it also being one of the leading data enterprise companies this side of the Atlantic.